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Using Equitick Bars

MESA theory dictates that the best results from intraday cycle trading are to be obtained using Equitick bars (see Ehlers 1993 article and, for a much more lengthy discussion, the Arms book listed among the MESA references in this help module). Aspen Systems Equitick mode has been tailored to MESAs requirements.

You can create an Equitick chart, with or without MESA, using any number of ticks per bar. A chart can be converted to an Equitick chart by displaying the chart rescaling menu and selecting EqTick:

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A chart can also be converted to an Equitick chart by typing the .EQTICK command. If you enter the .EQTICK command by itself, you get the default number of ticks per bar, which is 10. If you append a number to the command, i.e.,

.EQTICK 20

you get 20 ticks per bar.

Before you use Equitick bars, study the instrument you want to analyze for trading activity. Setting up an Equitick bar of 100 trades on an instrument that rarely trades more than 50 times per day will in fact create an Equitick bar that looks and, where MESA cycle analysis is concerned, acts like a daily bar chart. Equitick bars get reset at the beginning of each session. Therefore, knowing about an instruments typical trading activity is important in selecting an Equitick bar amount.

Equitick is a chart state. Once you place a chart window in the Equitick state, it displays Equitick bars until you tell it to do otherwise. When a chart is in the Equitick state, you can change the number of ticks per bar by entering a number. For example, if you have a chart displaying 10 tick bars and you want to see 20 tick bars, you would type 20 and press b.

To change an Equitick chart back to an interday chart, just type day, week, etc. To change it to an intraday chart, type 0 to get a tick chart and then the number of minutes, or display the chart rescaling menu and select Time (selecting Time displays a 15-minute bar chart).

Aspen Systems will provide as many bars as it has tick data to fill; so the number of Equitick bars you can view depends on the size of your tick data file (TICKS.DAT).